Big Bang starting reference point

[bsolomon_us]

I was trying to find ways to identify a point anywhere, anytime, any dimension and any universe. Seems the big bang was a good starting point and I think 

(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0)   or   (0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0) might reference it. Hey, it's a possible beginning and I wonder if anyone out there thinks I might be onto something.

[Genady]

14 minutes ago, bsolomon_us said:

I was trying to find ways to identify a point anywhere, anytime, any dimension and any universe. Seems the big bang was a good starting point and I think 

(0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0)   or   (0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0) might reference it. Hey, it's a possible beginning and I wonder if anyone out there thinks I might be onto something.

Hardly. Big Bang is not a point.

[MigL]

To elaborate ...

The Big Bang was everywhere.

[geordief]

1 hour ago, MigL said:

To elaborate ...

The Big Bang was everywhere.

Is it plausible to view the BB (if we are all talking about  the same thing**) as an "implosion"?

Intuitively (to me) that MIGHT better help me visualize a process where all subsequent points  pointed everywhere and anywhere  when looking for the "source"?

 

Like someone at the centre of a bicycle wheel looking towards the perimeter(that perimeter having been at one point -or as good as -initially)..

 

**Maybe I am thinking of an event before the BIg Bang?...

[iNow]

Nothing exploded. Nothing imploded. The universe itself expanded in all directions. There is no outside the universe. There is no before the universe. We're talking about spacetime so time itself didn't yet exist given current models.

We clearly have more to learn, and will hopefully arrive upon improved models in the future. For now, however, humans are apes and our tiny ape brains evolved to understand survival in the savannahs and reproduction in the trees and these cosmic inflationary concepts don't generally lend themselves to simple visualization. 

The map is not the territory and we're looking right now at maps. 

[Halc]

4 minutes ago, geordief said:

Is it plausible to view the BB (if we are all talking about  the same thing**) as an "implosion"?

That seems completely inappropriate. I don't get the bike wheel thing, whose perimeter was never at the axle.

2 hours ago, bsolomon_us said:

I was trying to find ways to identify a point anywhere, anytime, any dimension and any universe.

There is no coordinate system that ties events in our universe to whatever constitutes a point in another. There's not even units for that.

In our universe, the big bang, in an idealized naïve model, might be the event (0). Just one coordinate. No space coordinate because as MigL says, it's everywhere.

But beyond that it doesn't work. For instance, there is not coordinate system that gives the absolute location of you. To do that (10 meters west of my mailbox), one must first identify an origin for your coordinate system (the mailbox). This is fine and relative, but it isn't an absolute coordinate because the location of the mailbox hasn't been specified. You can't use the big bang reference as your spatial reference because it lacks a location in space. Not true of any other event, but true of that one.

It isn't like Utah where all you need to do to get a letter somewhere is give two coordinates. Three in Hong Kong.

[Endy0816]

Big Bang is after a hypothetical t=0, so universe already had some volume.

 

[Mordred]

2 hours ago, Endy0816 said:

Big Bang is after a hypothetical t=0, so universe already had some volume.

 

More accurately 10^{-43} seconds and yes it does have a volume but as mentioned the entire observable universe is contained in that volume that expanded. In other words you can't point anywhere and state the BB happened in that direction or in that location as every location was part of the initial volume.

[geordief]

3 hours ago, Mordred said:

More accurately 10^{-43} seconds and yes it does have a volume but as mentioned the entire observable universe is contained in that volume that expanded. In other words you can't point anywhere and state the BB happened in that direction or in that location as every location was part of the initial volume.

Do we have any idea of what was in that volume?

Was whatever it was differentiated  in some sense or was it simply  composed of  densities of the same thing?

Is it believed it was a closed system?

Does the small volume as compared to the volume that we see now mean it was "actually" small-or does it just indicate that it was highly ordered and the volume is only of any consideration  in relation  to what we see now?

Are the indications that the volume at T+10^-43secs  was bigger that  the volume as one tties to model  further back in time?

[Mordred]

Roughly 10^90 particles all in a state of thermal equilibrium so indistinguishable from one another. The initial volume if you extrapolate back corresponds to roughly 1 planck length in volume for a temperature of 10^19 GeV which if you convert corresponds to Planck temperature. Any math prior to 10^{-43} seconds will give a singularity condition.

The universe is described by thermodynamics as using a homogeneous and isotropic system. Where expansion is an adiabatic and isentropic system so yes a closed system 

 

 

Edited May 16 by Mordred

[geordief]

13 minutes ago, Mordred said:

Roughly 10^90 particles all in a state of thermal equilibrium so indistinguishable from one another. The initial volume if you extrapolate back corresponds to roughly 1 planck length in volume for a temperature of 10^19 GeV which if you convert corresponds to Planck temperature. Any math prior to 10^{-43} seconds will give a singularity condition.

The universe is described by thermodynamics as using a homogeneous and isotropic system. Where expansion is an adiabatic and isentropic system so yes a closed system 

 

 

How many fields are there supposed to be at 10^{-43}secs.

Are the 10^90 particles  all from the one field?

If all the particles are identicle ,what is exciting the field?

(doubtless  very naive and wrong headed questions)

 

[Mordred]

As everything is in thermal equilibrium including the four forces you can describe that state as a single photon field. It doesn't mean the other particles didn't exist but you wouldn't be able to tell one particle type from any other.

The reason it's oft treated as a photon field is that temperature is part of the EM field and blackbody temperature uses the  virtual photon as the mediator.

Keep in mind one can arbitrarily describe any state by any arbitrary number of fields the term field is any collection of values under a geometry treatment 

[Genady]

1 hour ago, Mordred said:

temperature of 10^19 GeV

which is 15 orders of magnitude higher than our models have been tested so far, right?

[Mordred]

In so far as any means of measurement via particle accelerators etc correct. We simply cannot produce those temperatures.  

Edited May 17 by Mordred

[MigL]

At 10^-43 sec. or Planck scale, geometry ceases to have meaning.
Since time is part of the geometry of space-time, it also ceases to have meaning.
People should stop asking "What happened before 10^-43 sec."
There was no 'before' as we know it.
The compact hot dense universe of that 'time' could have existed forever or for an instant; there would have been no difference.

[Endy0816]

4 hours ago, Mordred said:

Roughly 10^90 particles all in a state of thermal equilibrium so indistinguishable from one another. The initial volume if you extrapolate back corresponds to roughly 1 planck length in volume for a temperature of 10^19 GeV which if you convert corresponds to Planck temperature. Any math prior to 10^{-43} seconds will give a singularity condition.

I sometimes wonder if there's an issue with zero (maximums/minimums) as a concept. Not sure what we could replace it with though.

 

[geordief]

9 hours ago, MigL said:

At 10^-43 sec. or Planck scale, geometry ceases to have meaning.
Since time is part of the geometry of space-time, it also ceases to have meaning.
People should stop asking "What happened before 10^-43 sec."
There was no 'before' as we know it.
The compact hot dense universe of that 'time' could have existed forever or for an instant; there would have been no difference.

I didn't realize that t+10{-43} secs was  really as far as the model went.

What happens if we plug t-10{-43}secs into the equations?

Do we come out the "other side"?

Is the  "dead end" in the equations  because of quantum effects?

Edited May 17 by geordief

[joigus]

What @MigL is referring to is Planck's scale. If you want to probe space-time at scales roughly 10^-43 seconds (10^-35 m is another way to characterise it), you make black holes. So it doesn't quite make sense to discriminate between points, mesure distances, angles, speeds. There would be no geometry proper.

And I agree also with @Genady that the big bang is not a point, of course. A picture that I find particularly attractive is that of conformal symmetry, which is a universe in which there is scale invariance. In a conformally-invariant universe, there's no difference between big and small in a way. AAMOF, we know when temperatures are very high, conformal symmetry is more and more accurate. The universe would look very much like Maxwell's equations with no sources. Perhaps scale invariance is a spontaneously broken symmetry?

[Mordred]

One thing to recall is  that point is strictly the portion of our shared causality. We know the universe is larger than our Observable portion. We do not know how large the entire universe is beyond our Observable universe region of shared causality. 

This is one of thr fundamental reasons not to think of the singularity condition at 10^-43 seconds as being the same as the singularity condition of a BH.

 

[sethoflagos]

5 hours ago, geordief said:

What happens if we plug t-10{-43}secs into the equations?

Do we come out the "other side"?

How would we know? From what I understand of CPT symmetry (not much), an antimatter biased big bang expanding in the reverse time direction (from our perspective) would behave no differently to the universe we're in now, I think.

[geordief]

29 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

How would we know? From what I understand of CPT symmetry (not much), an antimatter biased big bang expanding in the reverse time direction (from our perspective) would behave no differently to the universe we're in now, I think.

Would that be into multiverse theories?

I think there are ideas(or one that I have heard of) about looking for physical evidence for them.

As for behaving differently might it increase the himan self satisfaction quotient if we developed a model that went back to the origin and out the other side?

 

[sethoflagos]

1 hour ago, geordief said:

Would that be into multiverse theories?

More of a dual-universe speculation.

Perhaps one way out of the t=0 conundrum is to drop the idea of absolute time at these scales in favour of a sequence of time intervals, one of which happens to span t=0. A form of quantisation if you will. The surface of that cell should have no associated infinities, but half of the boundary surface is time-reversed and that (the point you raise) would need to be addressed.

It's probably complete tosh, but the idea of two universes being spawned in opposite time directions has a pleasing symmetry to me.

 

[geordief]

1 hour ago, sethoflagos said:

erhaps one way out of the t=0 conundrum is to drop the idea of absolute time at these scales

I didn't know there was absolute time at any scale.

For a t=0 in the context of the earliest part of the universe what reference frame is chosen for t to apply to?

Any frame that is not actually specified as "the beginning"?(and as close as possible  to it for "simplicity's" sake?)

[sethoflagos]

39 minutes ago, geordief said:

I didn't know there was absolute time at any scale.

Probably the wrong word to choose. 

'Pointlike' may be better. Suggesting that an instantaneous 'now' of zero duration doesn't exist. So a unit of Planck time, say, wouldn't have any clearly definable start or endpoint.

[Mordred]

5 hours ago, geordief said:

Would that be into multiverse theories?

I think there are ideas(or one that I have heard of) about looking for physical evidence for them.

As for behaving differently might it increase the himan self satisfaction quotient if we developed a model that went back to the origin and out the other side?

 

There was an older multiverse model that has matter in one universe with antimatter and time reversal in the other universe. It long ago fell out of any research interest. ( due to better understanding of anti-matter in that the time reversal is a mathematical treatment for symmetry purposes and not actuality)

Edited May 17 by Mordred